Telecommunications, Cable & Utilities
Telecommunications, Cable & Utilities
Both Visa and MasterCard announced their support for Host Card Emulation (HCE) and their intent to release HCE specifications soon. I have been talking about HCE from late 2012 (partly due to my involvement with SimplyTapp) and you could read as to why HCE matter and what Android KitKat-HCE announcement meant for payments. But in light of the network certification announcements yesterday, this post is an attempt to provide some perspective on what the Visa/MasterCard moves mean, how do their approaches differ in certifying payments using cloud hosted credentials, what should issuers expect from a device and terminal support perspective, why retailers should take note of the debate around HCE and ultimately – the role I expect Google to continue to play around HCE. All good stuff. First, what do the Visa/MasterCard announcements mean? It means that it’s time for banks and other issuers to stop looking for directions. The network announcements around HCE specifications provide the clarity required by issuers to meaningfully invest in mobile contactless provisioning and payment. Further, it removes some of the unfavorable economics inherited from a secure element-centric model, who were forced to default to credit cards with higher interchange in the wallet. Renting space on the secure element cost a pretty penny and that is without taking operational costs in to consideration, and as an issuer if you are starting in the red out of the gate, you were not about to put a Durbin controlled debit card in the wallet. But those compulsions go with the wind now, as you are no longer weighed down by these costs and complexities on day one. And further, the door is open for retailers with private label programs or gift cards to also look at this route with a lot more interest. And they are. MasterCard mentioned bank pilots around HCE in its press release, but MCX is hardly the only retailer payment initiative in town. Let me leave it at that. How do the Visa/MasterCard specs differ? From the press releases, some of those differences are evident – but I believe they will coalesce at some point in the future. MasterCard’s approach speaks to mobile contact-less as the only payment modality, whereas Visa refers to augmenting the PayWave standard with QR and in-app payments in the future. Both approaches refer to payment tokens (single or multi-use) and one can expect them to work together with cloud provisioned card profiles, to secure the payment transaction and verify transactional integrity. To MasterCard’s benefit – it has given much thought to ensuring that these steps – provisioning the card profile, issuing payment tokens et al – are invisible to the consumer and therefore refrains from adding undue friction. I am a purist at heart – and I go back to the first iteration of Google Wallet – where all I had to do to pay was turn on the screen and place the device on the till. That is the simplicity to beat for any issuer or retailer payment experiences when using contactless. Otherwise, they are better off ripping out the point-of-sale altogether. MasterCard’s details also makes a reference to a PIN. The PIN will not be verified offline as it would have been if a Secure Element would have been present in the device, rather – it would be verified online which tells me that an incorrect PIN if input would be used to create an “incorrect cryptogram” which would be rejected upstream. Now I am conflicted using a PIN at the point of sale for anything – to me it is but a Band-Aid, it reflects the inability to reduce fraud without introducing friction. Visa so far seems to be intentionally light on details around mandating a PIN, and I believe not forcing one would be the correct approach – as you wouldn’t want to constrain issuers to entering a PIN as means to do authentication, and instead should have laid down the requirements but left it to the market to decide what would suffice – PIN, biometrics et al. Again – I hope these specs will continue to evolve and move towards a more amenable view towards customer authentication. Where do we stand with device and terminal support? All of this is mute if there are not enough devices that support NFC and specifically – Android KitKat. But if you consider Samsung devices by themselves (which is all one should consider for Android) they control over 30% of the NA market – 44.1 million devices sold in 2013 alone. Lion share of those devices support NFC out of the box – including Galaxy Note II and 3, Galaxy S3 and S4 – and their variants mini, Active, Xoom et al. And still, the disparity in their approach to secure elements, continuing lack of availability in standards and Android support – Tap and Pay was largely a dream. What was also worrisome is that 3 months after the launch of Android KitKat – it still struggles under 2% in device distribution. That being said, things are expected to get markedly better for Samsung devices at least. Samsung has noted that 14 of its newer devices will receive KitKat. These devices include all the NFC phones I have listed above. Carriers must follow through quickly (tongue firmly in cheek) to deliver on this promise before customers with old S3 devices see their contracts expire and move to a competitor (iPhone 6?). Though there was always speculation as to whether an MNO will reject HCE as part of the Android distribution, I see that as highly unlikely. Even carriers know a dead horse when they see one, and Isis’s current model is anything but one. Maybe Isis will move to embrace HCE. And then there is the issue of merchant terminals. When a large block of merchants are invested in upending the role of networks in the payment value chain – that intent ripples far and wide in the payments ecosystem. Though it’s a given that merchants of all sizes can expect to re-terminalize in the next couple of years to chip & pin (with contactless under the hood) – it is still the prerogative of the merchant as to whether the contactless capability is left turned on or off. And if merchants toe Best Buy’s strategy in how it opted to turn it off store-wide, then that limits the utility of an NFC wallet. And why wouldn’t they? Merchants have always viewed “Accept all cards” to also mean “Accept all cards despite the form factor” and believes that contactless could come to occupy a higher interchange tier in the future – as questions around fraud risk are sufficiently answered by the device in real-time. This fear is though largely unsubstantiated, as networks have not indicated that they could come to view mobile contact-less as being a “Card Present Plus” category that charges more. But in the absence of any real assurances, fear, uncertainty and doubt runs rampant. But what could a retailer do with HCE? If re-terminalization is certain, then retailers could do much to explore how to leverage it to close the gap with their customer. Private label credit, closed loop are viable alternatives that can be now carried over contactless – and if previously retailers were cut out of the equation due to heavy costs and complexity for provisioning cards to phones, they have none of those limitations now. A merchant could now fold in a closed loop product (like a gift card) in to their mobile app – and accept those payments over contact-less without resorting to clunky QR or barcode schemes. There is a lot of potential in the closed loop space with HCE, that Retailers are ignoring due to a “scorched earth” approach towards contactless. But smarter merchants are asking ‘how’. Finally, what about Google? Google deserves much praise for finally including HCE in Android and paving the way for brands to recognize the opportunity and certify the approach. That being said, Google has no unequal advantage with HCE. In fact, Google has little to do with HCE going forward, despite GoogleWallet utilization of HCE in the future. I would say – HCE has as much to do with Google going forward, as Amazon’s Kindle Fire has to do with Android. Banks and Retailers have to now decide what this means for them – and view HCE as separate to Google – and embrace it if they believe it has potential to incent their brands to remain top of wallet, and top of mind for the consumer. It is a level playing field, finally. Where do you go next? Indeed – there is a lot to take in – starting with HCE’s role, where it fit in to your payment strategy, impact and differences in Visa/MasterCard approaches, weaving all of these in to your mobile assets while not compromising on customer experience. Clarity and context is key and we can help with both. Reach out to us for a conversation. HCE is a means to an end – freeing you from the costs and complexities of leveraging contactless infrastructure to deliver an end-to-end mobile experience, but there is still the question of how your business should evolve to cater to the needs of your customers in the mobile channel. Payment is after all, just one piece of the puzzle.
By: Teri Tassara In my blog last month, I covered the importance of using quality credit attributes to gain greater accuracy in risk models. Credit attributes are also powerful in strengthening the decision process by providing granular views on consumers based on unique behavior characteristics. Effective uses include segmentation, overlay to scores and policy definition – across the entire customer lifecycle, from prospecting to collections and recovery. Overlay to scores – Credit attributes can be used to effectively segment generic scores to arrive at refined “Yes” or “No” decisions. In essence, this is customization without the added time and expense of custom model development. By overlaying attributes to scores, you can further segment the scored population to achieve appreciable lift over and above the use of a score alone. Segmentation – Once you made your “Yes” or “No” decision based on a specific score or within a score range, credit attributes can be used to tailor your final decision based on the “who”, “what” and “why”. For instance, you have two consumers with the same score. Credit attributes will tell you that Consumer A has a total credit limit of $25K and a BTL of 8%; Consumer B has a total credit limit of $15K, but a BTL of 25%. This insight will allow you to determine the best offer for each consumer. Policy definition - Policy rules can be applied first to get the desirable universe. For example, an auto lender may have a strict policy against giving credit to anyone with a repossession in the past, regardless of the consumer’s current risk score. High quality attributes can play a significant role in the overall decision making process, and its expansive usage across the customer lifecycle adds greater flexibility which translates to faster speed to market. In today’s dynamic market, credit attributes that are continuously aligned with market trends and purposed across various analytical are essential to delivering better decisions.
When I wrote about Host Card Emulation back in March, it provoked much debate around whether this capability will die on the cutting floor or be meaningfully integrated in to a future Android iteration. And now that it has, this post is an attempt to look forward, even though much of it is speculative. But I will provide some perspective from a number of conversations I had in the last week with Networks, Issuers, TSMs, Merchants, Platform Owners and EMV practitioners and provide some insight in to perceptions, impacts and the road ahead for NFC. And I will provide some context to why HCE matters to each of these players. First – if you haven’t read my previous post on HCE – this would be a good time to do so. Media has unfortunately focused yet again on the controversy in light of the KitKat HCE announcement – focusing on the end-run around Carriers rather than the upside this brings to those who have been disincentivized previously to consider NFC. What they all seem to have missed is that HCE allows for the following: it reduces the gap between merchants and card issuance, brings the topic of closed-loop and contactless in focus, and more tactically – allows for an easy deployment scenario that does not require them to change the software inside the terminal. I hope those three things do not get lost in translation. Google: Being a Platform Owner for once The Android team deserves much credit for enabling support for Host Card Emulation in KitKat. Beyond the case for platform support – something Blackberry already had – there were both altruistic and selfish reasons for going this route. The former – altruistic – had to do with throwing open another door that would invite third party developers to build on an open NFC stack – while firmly shutting other ones (read criticism from Ars that Android is quickly becoming a closed source – partly through its Play services approach). It was time it acted like a platform owner. And being one entailed democratizing access to tap-and-pay. Selfish – because for the more than 200M Android devices that shipped with NFC support – a fraction of these are tap-and-pay worthy. It had become absurd that one must enquire upon Carrier, Platform, Issuer and Device support before installing an NFC payment app, much less use it. Talk about fragmentation. This was a problem only Google could begin to fix – by removing the absurd limitations put in place in the name of security – but in truth existed because of profit, control and convenience. Google’s role hardly ends here. Today – Host Card Emulation – by definition alone, is reserved as a technical topic. Out of the gate, much needs to be done to educate Issuers and Merchants as to why this matters. For retailers – used to much cynicism in matters relating to NFC – Host Card Emulation offers an opportunity to develop and deploy a closed-loop contactless scheme using retailer’s preferred payment sources – private label, debit, credit and in that order. HCE to Merchants: Friend or Foe? In my opinion – merchants stand to benefit most from HCE. Which is another reason why Google really embraced this concept. Despite having certain benefits for Issuers to provision cards without having to pay the piper, Google had its eyes set on expanding the offline footprint for GoogleWallet and to successfully do so – needed to focus on the merchant value prop while dialing back on what retailers once called the “data donation agreement”. Where merchants primarily struggle today in mobile – is not in replicating the plastic model – it is to create a brand new loyalty platform where the customer sets a payment source and forgets it – preferably one that’s preferred by the merchant – for example a private label card or debit. Except, no open loop wallets had actually centered itself around this premise so far. Google Wallet launched with Citi, then reverted to a negative margin strategy – by charging the merchant CP rates while paying the Issuers CNP rates. It wasn’t ideal – as merchants did not want Google anywhere near the transaction value chain. Meanwhile – it gave Google quite the heartburn to see Apple being successful with Passbook – requiring merchants give nothing back in return for leveraging it to deliver geo-targeted offers and loyalty. This silent takedown must have forced Google’s hands in getting serious about building a complete offer, loyalty, payment scheme that is collaborative (HCE support was a collaborative effort introduced by SimplyTapp) and merchant friendly. I believe HCE support now represents a serious effort to help merchants commercialize a closed-loop advantage in contactless without requiring software changes inside the terminal. Contactless was out of bounds for merchants till now. Not anymore. Having fielded a number of calls from retailers as to what this means, I will distill retailer reactions down to this: measured optimism, casual pessimism and “network” cynicism. Retailers have always looked at EMV and terminalization as a head-fake for NFC – to further lay down the tracks for another three decades of control around pricing and what they see as anti-competitive behavior. Though HCE is in no way tethered to NFC (it’s agnostic of a communication method) – due to its current close association with NFC, merchants see the conversation as a non-starter – until there is a constructive dialogue with networks. At the same time, merchants are cautiously optimistic about the future of HCE – provided that there is a standards body that provides them equal footing with Platform owners, Issuers and networks – to dictate its scope and future. As the platform owner – Google should work with the merchant body, networks, issuers and other stakeholders to see this through. It was not a surprise that those who I talked to all agreed about one thing: that Carriers really should have no role to play in this framework. TSM’s/SE Providers: Where to from here? The nine party model is dead, or will be very soon – as the SE rental model has been shown as previously not being sustainable – and now with HCE – simply wasteful. TSM’s had been focused outside of US for the last several years – as the lack of meaningful commercial launches meant that the US market will simply not bring scale for many years. And with Google shifting away from using a Secure Element in its flagship Nexus models – the writing was already on the wall. TSM’s will look to extend their capabilities in to non-traditional partnerships (Gemalto/MCX) and in to non-hardware scenarios (competing with Cloud SE providers like SimplyTapp in the HCE model). Bell-ID is such an example – and quite likely the only example right now. Networks: Certify or Not? What does Host Card Emulation mean to V/MA? It is no secret that the networks had more than toyed with the idea of software card emulation these last couple of years – realizing the rapidly shrinking runway for NFC. Focus for networks should be now to certify the new approach, as a legitimate way to store and transfer credentials. It’s interesting to hear how our neighbors in the north have reacted to this news. There is still ambiguity among Canadian issuers and networks as to what this means – including debates as to whether an onboard SE is still required for secure storage. That ambiguity will not dissipate till V/MA step in and do their part. I must quote an EMV payments consultant from the north who wrote to me this week: “My boss calls the TSM model “traditional” and I remind him in NFC payments there is no tradition… I think for some people the Global Platform standards with the TSM smack in the middle are like a comfort food – you know what you are getting and it feels secure (with 1000′s of pages of documentation how could they not be!)” That should give GP and TSMs some comfort. Device Support for HCE: What does that look like? Google does not report sales figures on Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Google Play editions of Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One – the four devices that are slated to receive KitKat over the next few weeks (apart from the Nexus tablets). So if I would venture a guess – I would say approx 20M devices in total that has NFC capability that will support Host Card Emulation soon. That may not seem much – but it’s a strong base . There is also a possibility that post-Galaxy Nexus devices from Samsung may leapfrog 4.3 to go directly to KitKat. If that happens – just based on reported sales volumes for Galaxy S3 and S4 – that would be a total of 100M devices with NFC support. What does that mean for Samsung’s revenue model around SE – who has an embedded SE from Oberthur in the S3 & S4 devices, which it hopes to charge rent to Visa and others – that’s unclear at this point. Issuers: ISIS alternative or more? For those issuers who passed on Isis, or those who were scorned by Isis – this enables them to outfit their current mobile assets with a payment feature. I wrote about the absurdity in a contactless transaction where the consumer has to close his merchant or banking app and switch to Isis to tap-and-pay – instead of equipping merchant/bank apps with a tap-and-pay feature. HCE means a lot more for Private label Issuers – who have a very inspired base of merchants looking to bridge the gap between private label cards and mobile – and now have an alternative to clumsy, costly and complex orchestrations for provisioning cards – replaced with an easy integration and cheaper deployment. More about that later. Finally, Carriers & Isis: Fight or Flight? God Speed.
TL;DR Read within as to how Touch ID is made possible via ARM’s TrustZone/TEE, and why this matters in the context of the coming Apple’s identity framework. Also I explain why primary/co-processor combos are here to stay. I believe that eventually, Touch ID has a payments angle – but focusing on e-commerce before retail. Carriers will weep over a lost opportunity while through Touch ID, we have front row seats to Apple’s enterprise strategy, its payment strategy and beyond all – the future direction of its computing platform. I had shared my take on a possible Apple Biometric solution during the Jan of this year based on its Authentec acquisition. I came pretty close, except for the suggestion that NFC is likely to be included. (Sigh.) Its a bit early to play fast and loose with Apple predictions, but its Authentec acquisition should rear its head sometime in the near future (2013 – considering Apple’s manufacturing lead times), that a biometric solution packaged neatly with an NFC chip and secure element could address three factors that has held back customer adoption of biometrics: Ubiquity of readers, Issues around secure local storage and retrieval of biometric data, Standardization in accessing and communicating said data. An on-chip secure solution to store biometric data – in the phone’s secure element can address qualms around a central database of biometric data open to all sorts of malicious attacks. Standard methods to store and retrieve credentials stored in the SE will apply here as well. Why didn’t Apple open up Touch ID to third party dev? Apple expects a short bumpy climb ahead for Touch ID before it stabilizes, as early users begin to use it. By keeping its use limited to authenticating to the device, and to iTunes – it can tightly control the potential issues as they arise. If Touch ID launched with third party apps and were buggy, it’s likely that customers will be confused where to report issues and who to blame. That’s not to say that it won’t open up Touch ID outside of Apple. I believe it will provide fettered access based on the type of app and the type of action that follows user authentication. Banking, Payment, Productivity, Social sharing and Shopping apps should come first. Your fart apps? Probably never. Apple could also allow users to set their preferences (for app categories, based on user’s current location etc.) such that biometrics is how one authenticates for transactions with risk vs not requiring it. If you are at home and buying an app for a buck – don’t ask to authenticate. But if you were initiating a money transfer – then you would. Even better – pair biometrics with your pin for better security. Chip and Pin? So passé. Digital Signatures, iPads and the DRM 2.0: It won’t be long before an iPad shows up in the wild sporting Touch ID. And with Blackberry’s much awaited and celebrated demise in the enterprise, Apple will be waiting on the sidelines – now with capabilities that allow digital signatures to become ubiquitous and simple – on email, contracts or anything worth putting a signature on. Apple has already made its iWork productivity apps(Pages, Numbers, Keynote), iMovie and iPhoto free for new iOS devices activated w/ iOS7. Apple, with a core fan base that includes photographers, designers and other creative types, can now further enable iPads and iPhones to become content creation devices, with the ability to attribute any digital content back to its creator by a set of biometric keys. Imagine a new way to digitally create and sign content, to freely share, without worrying about attribution. Further Apple’s existing DRM frameworks are strengthened with the ability to tag digital content that you download with your own set of biometric keys. Forget disallowing sharing content – Apple now has a way to create a secondary marketplace for its customers to resell or loan digital content, and drive incremental revenue for itself and content owners. Conclaves blowing smoke: In a day and age where we forego the device for storing credentials – whether it be due to convenience or ease of implementation – Apple opted for an on-device answer for where to store user’s biometric keys. There is a reason why it opted to do so – other than the obvious brouhaha that would have resulted if it chose to store these keys on the cloud. Keys inside the device. Signed content on the cloud. Best of both worlds. Biometric keys need to be held locally, so that authentication requires no roundtrip and therefore imposes no latency. Apple would have chosen local storage (ARM’s SecurCore) as a matter of customer experience, and what would happen if the customer was out-of-pocket with no internet access. There is also the obvious question that a centralized biometric keystore will be on the crosshairs of every malicious entity. By decentralizing it, Apple made it infinitely more difficult to scale an attack or potential vulnerability. More than the A7, the trojan in Apple’s announcement was the M7 chip – referred to as the motion co-processor. I believe the M7 chip does more than just measuring motion data. M7 – A security co-processor? I am positing that Apple is using ARM’s TrustZone foundation and it may be using the A7 or the new M7 co-processor for storing these keys and handling the secure backend processing required. Horace Dediu of Asymco had called to question why Apple had opted for M7 and suggested that it may have a yet un-stated use. I believe M7 is not just a motion co-processor, it is also a security co-processor. I am guessing M7 is based on the Cortex-M series processors and offloads much of this secure backend logic from the primary A7 processor and it may be that the keys themselves are likely to be stored here on M7. The Cortex-M4 chip has capabilities that sound very similar to what Apple announced around M7 – such as very low power chip, that is built to integrate sensor output and wake up only when something interesting happens. We should know soon. This type of combo – splitting functions to be offloaded to different cores, allows each cores to focus on the function that it’s supposed to performed. I suspect Android will not be far behind in its adoption, where each core focuses on one or more specific layers of the Android software stack. Back at Google I/O 2013, it had announced 3 new APIs (the Fused location provider) that enables location tracking without the traditional heavy battery consumption. Looks to me that Android decoupled it so that we will see processor cores that focus on these functions specifically – soon. I am fairly confident that Apple has opted for ARM’s Trustzone/TEE. Implementation details of the Trustzone are proprietary and therefore not public. Apple could have made revisions to the A7 chip spec and could have co-opted its own. But using the Trustzone/TEE and SecurCore allows Apple to adopt existing standards around accessing and communicating biometric data. Apple is fully aware of the need to mature iOS as a trusted enterprise computing platform – to address the lack of low-end x86 devices that has a hardware security platform tech. And this is a significant step towards that future. What does Touch ID mean to Payments? Apple plans for Touch ID kicks off with iTunes purchase authorizations. Beyond that, as iTunes continue to grow in to a media store behemoth – Touch ID has the potential to drive fraud risk down for Apple – and to further allow it to drive down risk as it batches up payment transactions to reduce interchange exposure. It’s quite likely that à la Walmart, Apple has negotiated rate reductions – but now they can assume more risk on the front-end because they are able to vouch for the authenticity of these transactions. As they say – customer can longer claim the fifth on those late-night weekend drunken purchase binges. Along with payment aggregation, or via iTunes gift cards – Apple has now another mechanism to reduce its interchange and risk exposure. Now – imagine if Apple were to extend this capability beyond iTunes purchases – and allow app developers to process in-app purchases of physical goods or real-world experiences through iTunes in return for better blended rates? (instead of Paypal’s 4% + $0.30). Heck, Apple can opt for short-term lending if they are able to effectively answer the question of identity – as they can with Touch ID. It’s Paypal’s ‘Bill Me Later’ on steroids. Effectively, a company like Apple who has seriously toyed with the idea of a Software-SIM and a “real-time wireless provider marketplace” where carriers bid against each other to provide you voice, messaging and data access for the day – and your phone picks the most optimal carrier, how far is that notion from picking the cheapest rate across networks for funneling your payment transactions? Based on the level of authentication provided or other known attributes – such as merchant type, location, fraud risk, customer payment history – iTunes can select across a variety of payment options to pick the one that is optimal for the app developer and for itself. And finally, who had the most to lose with Apple’s Touch ID? Carriers. I wrote about this before as well, here’s what I wrote then (edited for brevity): Does it mean that Carriers have no meaningful role to play in commerce? Au contraire. They do. But its around fraud and authentication. Its around Identity. … But they seem to be stuck imitating Google in figuring out a play at the front end of the purchase funnel, to become a consumer brand(Isis). The last thing they want to do is leave it to Apple to figure out the “Identity management” question, which the latter seems best equipped to answer by way of scale, the control it exerts in the ecosystem, its vertical integration strategy that allows it to fold in biometrics meaningfully in to its lineup, and to start with its own services to offer customer value. So there had to have been much ‘weeping and moaning and gnashing of the teeth’ on the Carrier fronts with this launch. Carriers have been so focused on carving out a place in payments, that they lost track of what’s important – that once you have solved authentication, payments is nothing but accounting. I didn’t say that. Ross Anderson of Kansas City Fed did. What about NFC? I don’t have a bloody clue. Maybe iPhone6? iPhone This is a re-post from Cherian's original blog post "Smoke is rising from Apple's Conclave"
By: Matt Sifferlen I recently read interesting articles on the Knowledge@Wharton and CNNMoney sites covering the land grab that\'s taking place among financial services startups that are trying to use a consumer\'s social media activity and data to make lending decisions. Each of these companies are looking at ways to take the mountains of social media data that sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn generate in order to create new and improved algorithms that will help lenders target potential creditworthy individuals. What are they looking at specifically? Some criteria could be: History of typing in ALL CAPS or all lower case letters Frequent usage of inappropriate comments Number of senior level connections on LinkedIn The quantity of posts containing cats or annoying self-portraits (aka \"selfies\") Okay, I made that last one up. The point is that these companies are scouring through the data that individuals are creating on social sites and trying to find useful ways to slice and dice it in order to evaluate and target consumers better. On the consumer banking side of the house, there are benefits for tracking down individuals for marketing and collections purposes. A simple search could yield a person\'s Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profile. The behaviorial information can then be leveraged as a part of more targeted multi-channel and contact strategies. On the commercial banking side, utilizing social site info can help to supplement any traditional underwriting practices. Reviewing the history of a company\'s reviews on Yelp or Angie\'s List could share some insight into how a business is perceived and reveal whether there is any meaningful trend in the level of negative feedback being posted or potential growth outlook of the company. There are some challenges involved with leveraging social media data for these purposes. 1. Easily manipulated information 2. Irrelevant information that doesn\'t represent actual likes, thoughts or relevant behaviors 3. Regulations From a Fraud perspective, most online information can easily and frequently be manipulated which can create a constantly moving target for these providers to monitor and link to the right customer. Fake Facebook and Twitter pages, false connections and referrals on LinkedIn, and fabricated positive online reviews of a business can all be accomplished in a matter of minutes. And commercial fraudsters are likely creating false business social media accounts today for shelf company fraud schemes that they plan on hatching months or years down the road. As B2B review websites continue to make it easier to get customers signed up to use their services, the downside is there will be even more unusable information being created since there are less and less hurdles for commercial fraudsters to clear, particularly for sites that offer their services for free. For now, the larger lenders are more likely to utilize alternative data sources that are third party validated, like rent and utility payment histories, while continuing to rely on tools that can prevent against fraud schemes. It will be interesting to see what new credit and non credit data will be utilized as a common practice in the future as lenders continue their efforts to find more useful data to power their credit and marketing decisions.
Contact information such as phone numbers and addresses are fundamental to being able to reach a debtor, but knowing when to reach out to the debtor is also a crucial factor impacting success or failure in getting payment. As referenced in the chart below, when a consumer enters the debtor life cycle, they often avoid talking with you about the debt because they do not have the ability to pay. When the debtor begins to recover financially, you want to be sure you are among the first to reach out to them so you can be the first to be paid. According to Don Taylor, President of Automated Collection Services, they have seen a lift of more than 12% of consumers with trigger hits entering repayment, and this on an aged portfolio that has already been actively worked by debt collection staff. Monitoring for a few key changes on the credit profiles of debtors provides the passive monitoring that is needed to tell you the optimal time to reach back to the consumer for payment. Experian compiled several recent collection studies and found that a debtor paying off an account that was previously past due provided a 710% increase in the average payment. Positive improvement on a consumers’ credit profile is one of those vital indicators that the consumer is beginning to recover financially and could have the will—and ability—to pay bad debts. The collection industry is not like the big warehouse stores—quantity and value do not always work hand in hand for the debt collection industry. Targeting the high value credit events that are proven to increase collection amounts is the key to value, and Experian has the expertise, analytics and data to help you collect in the most effective manner. Be sure to check out our other debt collection blog posts to learn how to recover debt more quickly and efficiently.
At midnight yesterday, Google sent me an email on how the new GoogleWallet update will now allow me to store my “Citi MasterCard” online. As other Google Wallet aficionados may recall (Bueller..? Bueller..?), Citi was the lone holdout in Google Wallet’s journey to the cloud and its race to conformity. Though to the untrained eye the Google Wallet app experience was mostly uniform irrespective of the card used to pay at the point-of-sale, behind the scenes, if the Citi MasterCard was used, Google had to do things one way versus another way for the rest of the brood. Furthermore, sharing the precious real estate that is the Secure Element with Citi meant that Google had very little room to maneuver. Embedded SEs, despite being newer to market than SIM-based SE’s, were limited in storage versus other chips. The initial embedded SEs that Google Wallet relied on had about 76KB memory, which once you factor in all the trimmings that come with provisioning a card to SE (MasterCard PayPass applet among others), left very little wiggle room. So Google, forced by a number of factors (resistance from the carriers and issuers, rising costs and complexities attributed to the multiple TSM model, a lack of SE space to accommodate future provisioning) migrated to the cloud — and left a MasterCard proxy on the wallet that it could use to funnel transactions through. The only standout to this model was the umbilical cord to the original Google Wallet partner: Citi. I had predicted last September that the partnership’s days were numbered. When the wallet is Google’s, and it needs to both reclaim the space on SE and reduce the provisioning or account management costs that it owes to its TSM (FirstData), the only reason for it to carry the torch for Citi would be if Google Wallet customers demanded it. But it so happens that any returns for items purchased using Google Wallet untill today had also been slightly broken. If you bought an item using the virtual MasterCard then the returns followed one route; of you purchased an item via the Citi card then returns were handled a different way. Additionally, It was disappointing for a customer to see “Paypass Merchant” instead of “McDonalds” and “Sent” instead of “$25.54″ when paying with the Citi card in GoogleWallet(unless one was planning to hide a fastfood habit from a spouse). A small mess – especially when it should be attributed to powers beyond the partnership, but still a mess for Google who demands conformity in customer experience across all its offerings. In the end, this partnership served no broader purpose for either partner to keep alive for any longer. Google is ready to move on beyond Wallet 1.0 and realizes that it can do so without issuers in tow. Furthermore, it had been expected for a better part of three months that Google will launch its partnership with Discover and this puts Google as an indispensable element back in the mobile payment narrative. For the issuers who were originally courted by Google Wallet in its early days this serves as validation, that they were correct in choosing to stay away. But that is no excuse for ignoring what Google and others are building as a parallel framework to the value-added services (credit card rewards being one) card issuers use to show that customers will choose them over Google. (But if Google could tout interchange relief to merchants as an incentive to court them, don’t you think a Google Rewards program will be close behind, supported by credits redeemable the Google Play store? Once again, it’s not an if, but when.) Finally, where does this leave Citi? Citi is a global institution with enough smart people at their end to make up for lost time. Google Wallet did not become the boogeyman that issuers feared back in 2011, and Citi can afford to roll out its own mobile initiatives in a measured pace at a global scale. And there had been rumblings of a Citi wallet all through 2012 and we may see it soon manifest outside of the U.S. before Citi attempts to do so here. Google may have opted to cut the cord so that there is no ambiguity when that happens. But they still have both Citi and FirstData to thank for bringing it to the prom. You dance with the one that brung ya…or something like it. Do you think this means GoogleWallet is now adrift, loyal to its own quest? What’s next for Citi? What do you think? Please leave your opinions below. This is a re-post from Cherian's personal blog at DropLabs
First, it aims to drastically reduce payment acceptance costs through any and all means and Secondly – keep merchant data firmly within their purview. MCX – MerChants reduX: The post that follows is a collection of thoughts around MCX, why it deserves respect, and yet how it is indeed mortal and bleeds like all others. For those who are not familiar with MCX – it’s a consortium of over 30 leading national retailers with a singular purpose – that is, to create a seamlessly integrated mobile commerce platform. The website for MCX is http://www.mcx.com. The consortium is led by merchants like Walmart, Target, CVS, BestBuy, Gap, Sears etc. By 2012, the mobile payments space was fragmented as it is, which itself may have precipitated the launch of MCX. And to a number of solutions looking for traction, things ground to a halt when MCX conceptualized to the merchants a solution that needed no costly upgrades and a promise to route the transaction over low cost routing options. My friends on the issuer side privately confide that MCX has infact succeeded in throwing a monkey wrench in their mobile payment plans – and merchant acceptance looks to be ambiguous around incumbent initiatives such as Isis and GoogleWallet, as well as for alternative payment initiatives. It had been easy to call it mere posturing and ignore it in the early days, but of late there is a lot of hand wringing behind the scenes and too many furrowed brows, as if the realization finally struck that merchants were indeed once again crucial to mobile payment adoption. MCX – It’s raison d’etre Meanwhile, the stakeholders behind MCX have been religious in their affirmation that MCX lives by two core tenets: First, it aims to drastically reduce payment acceptance costs through any and all means and Secondly – keep merchant data firmly within their purview. I can’t seem to think that the latter was any more than an after thought, because merchants individually can choose to decide if they wish to share customer preferences or Level III data with third parties, but they need all the collective clout they can muster to push networks and issuers to agree to reduce card acceptance costs. So if one distils MCX down to its raison d’etre, then it looks that it is aimed squarely at No.1. Which is fair when you consider that the merchants believe card fees are one of their biggest operating expenses. In 2007, 146,000 convenience stores and gas stations nationwide made a total of $3.4B in profits, yet they paid out $7.6B in card acceptance costs(Link). And MCX is smart to talk about the value of merchant data, the need to control it, yada yada yada. But if that were indeed more important, Isis could have been the partner of choice – someone who would treat customer and transaction data as sacrosanct and leave it behind for the merchants to fiddle with(vs. GoogleWallet’s mine..mine..mine.. strategy). But the same way HomeDepot was disappointed when they first saw GoogleWallet – no interchange relief, incremental benefits at the point-of-sale, and swoops all their data in return, Isis also offers little relief to MCX or its merchants, even without requiring any transaction or SKU level data in return. Does it mean that Carriers have no meaningful role to play in commerce? Au contraire. They do. But its around fraud and authentication. Its around Identity. And creating a platform for merchants to deliver coupons, alerts to opted-in customers. But they seem to be stuck imitating Google in figuring out a play at the front end of the purchase funnel, to become a consumer brand. The last thing they want to do is leave it to Apple to figure out the “Identity management” question, which the latter seems best equipped to answer by way of scale, the control it exerts in the ecosystem, its vertical integration strategy that allows it to fold in biometrics meaningfully in to its lineup, and to start with its own services to offer customer value. Did we say Apple? Its a bit early to play fast and loose with Apple predictions, but its Authentec acquisition should rear its head sometime in the near future (2013 – considering Apple’s manufacturing lead times), that a biometric solution packaged neatly with an NFC chip and secure element could address three factors that has held back customer adoption of biometrics: Ubiquity of readers, Issues around secure local storage and retrieval of biometric data, Standardization in accessing and communicating said data. An on-chip secure solution to store biometric data – in the phone’s secure element can address qualms around a central database of biometric data open to all sorts of malicious attacks. Standard methods to store and retrieve credentials stored in the SE will apply here as well. Why NFC? If NFC was originally meant to seamlessly and securely share content, what better way to sign that content, to have it be attributable to its original author, or to enforce one’s rights to said content – than to sign it with one’s digital signature. Identity is key, not just when enforcing digital rights management on shared content, but also to secure commerce and address payment/fraud risk. Back to MCX. The more I read the more it seems MCX is trying to imitate Isis in competing for the customer mindshare, in attempting to become a consumer brand – than simply trying to be a cheaper platform for payment transactions. As commerce evolved beyond being able to be cleanly classified under “Card Present” and “Card Not Present” – as transactions originate online but get fulfilled in stores, merchants expect rules to evolve alongside reality. For example, when customers are able to order online, but pick up in-store after showing a picture ID, why would merchants have to pay “Card not Present” rates when risk is what we attribute higher CNP rates to, and why is there an expectation of the same amount of risk even in this changed scenario? And beyond, as technology innovation blurs the lines that neatly categorized commerce, where we replace “Card Present” with “Mobile Present”, and mobile carry a significant amount of additional context that could be scored to address or quantify risk, why shouldn’t it be?. It’s a given that networks will have to accommodate for reduced risk in transactions where mobile plays a role, where the merchant or the platform enabling the transaction can meaningfully use that context to validate customer presence at the point-of-sale – and that they will expect appropriate interchange reduction in those scenarios. MCX – A brand like Isis or a platform? But when reading portions of the linked NRF blog, and elsewhere – it reflects a misplaced desire on MCX’s part to become a consumer facing solution – an app that all MCX partners will embrace for payment. This is so much like the Isis solution of today – that I have written about – and why it flies in the face of reason. Isis – the nexus between Carriers and FI’s – is a powerful notion, if one considers the role it could play in enabling an open platform – around provisioning, authentication and marketing. But for that future to materialize, Isis has to stop competing with Google, and must accept that it has little role to play by itself at the front end of the funnel, and must recede to its role of an enabler – one that puts its partner FI brands front and center, allows Chase’s customers to pay using Chase’s mobile app instead of Isis, and drives down the fraud risk at the point of sale by meaningfully authenticating the customer via his location and mobile assets Carriers control, and further – the historical data they have on the customer. It’s those three points of data and the scale Isis can bring, that puts them credibly in the payments value chain – not the evaporating control around the Secure Element. In the same vein, the value MCX brings to merchants – is the collective negotiating power of over 30 national merchants. But is it a new consumer brand, or is it a platform focused on routing the transaction over the least cost routing option. If its the latter, then it has a strong parallel in Paypal. And as we may see Paypal pop-up as legal tender in many a retailer’s mobile apps and checkout aisles going forward, MCX is likely to succeed by emulating that retailer aligned strategy than follow a brand of its own. Further, If MCX wants customers to pay using less costly means – whether they be private label, prepaid or ACH – then it and its partners must do everything they can to shift the customer focus away from preferred payment methods and focus on the customer experience and resulting value around loyalty. MCX must build its value proposition elsewhere, and make their preferred payment methods the bridge to get the customer there. Another example where the retailer focused too much on the payment, and less so on the customer experience is the Safeway Fast Forward program. The value proposition is clear for the customer – Pay using your Safeway Fast Forward card number and a self assigned PIN for simpler checkout. However to set up your account, the customer must provide a State issued ID (Drivers License) and on top of it – his Social Security Number(Safeway Fast Forward Requirements Here). What customer would, for the incremental convenience of paying via his Fast Forward Card and PIN, be willing to entrust Safeway with his Social Security Number? Clearly Safeway’s Risk team had a say in this and instead of coming up with better ways to answer questions around Risk and Fraud, they introduced a non-starter, which killed any opportunity for meaningful adoption. MCX & adoption So where does that leave MCX? Why will I use it? How will it address questions around adoption? It’s a given that it will have to answer the same questions around fraud and authentication during customer on-boarding or at a transactional level. Further, its not enough these days to simply answer questions pertaining to the customer. Further, one must address questions relating to the integrity and reputation of the device the customer use – whether that be a mobile device or a Laptop PC. But beyond fraud and auth, there are difficult questions around what would compel a techno-luddite who has historically paid using a credit instrument to opt for an ACH driven(i am guessing) MCX payment scheme. Well, for one: MCX and its retail partners can control the purchasing power parity of MCX credits. If they so wish, and after aggregating customer profiles across retailers, MCX determines that the Addams family spends a collective $400 on average per month between all the MCX retailers. MCX could propose that if instead, the Addams family were to commit to buy $450 in MCX credits each month, they could increase their purchasing power an additional $45 credits that could be used on specific retail categories (or flat out across all merchandise)? Would Morticia be interested? If she did, what does that mean to MCX? It eliminated having to pay interchange on approx $500, and further it enabled its partners to capture an incremental spend of 10% that did not exist before. Only merchants will be able to pull this off – by leveraging past trends, close relationships with CPG manufacturers and giving Morticia new reasons to spend in the manner they want her to. But then again, where does MCX stop in providing a level playing field for its partners, and step back – so that merchants can start to compete for their customers and their spend? And finally, can it survive the natural conflicts that will arise, and limit its scope to areas that all can agree – for long enough for it to take root? Should MCX become the next Isis or the next Paypal? Which makes most sense? What do you think? Please leave your opinions below... (This blog post is an adaptation of its original post found - http://www.droplabs.co/?p=662)
All skip tracing data is the same, right? Not exactly. While there are many sources of consumer contact data available to debt collectors, the quality, freshness, depth and breadth can vary significantly. Just as importantly, what you ultimately do or don't do with the data depends on several factors such as: Whether or not the debt is worth your while to pursue How deep and fresh the data is What if no skip data is available, and, What happens if there is no new information available when you go to your skip-tracing vendor requesting new leads? So what's the best way for your company to locate debtors? What data sources are right for you? Check out my recent article in Collections and Credit Risk for some helpful advice, and be sure to check out our other debt collection industry blog posts for best practices, tips and tricks on ways to recover more debt, faster. What data sources do you find most beneficial to your business and why? Let us know by commenting below.
It comes as no surprise to anyone that cell phone usage continues to rise, while at the same time the usage of wire lines, or what used to be affectionately known as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), continues to decline. Some recent statistics, supplied by the CDC show that: 34% of all households are now wireless only 25 states have rates of primary wireless exceeding 50% Landline only households is now down to only 10.2% When you couple that with churn rates for cell phones that can exceed 40% a year, it becomes paramount to find a good source for cell numbers if you are trying to contact an existing customer or collect on an overdue bill. But where can debt collectors go to find reliable cell phone numbers? The cell phone providers won’t sell you a database, there is no such thing as 411 for cell phones, nor is it likely there will be one in the near future with the aforementioned 40%+ churn rates. Each cell phone service provider will continue to protect their customer base. There are a few large compilers of cell phone numbers; they mostly harvest these numbers from surveys and sources that capture the numbers as a part of an online service—think ringtones here! These numbers can be good, at least initially, if they came with an address which enables you to search for them. The challenge is that these numbers can grow stale relatively quickly. Companies that maintain recurring transactions with consumers have a better shot at having current cell numbers. Utilities and credit bureaus offer an opportunity to capture these self-reported numbers. At our company, over 40% of self-reported phones are cell phones. However, in most cases, you must have a defined purpose as governed by Gramm Leach Bliley (GLB) in order to access them. Of course, the defined purpose also goes hand in hand with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which restricts use of automatic dialers and prohibits unsolicited calls via a cell phone. Conclusion? If you are trying to find someone’s cell number for debt collection purposes, I recommend using a resource more likely to receive updates on the owner of a cell over that of compilers who are working with one time event data. In today’s world, obtaining an accurate good cell number is a challenge and will continue to be. What cell phone number resources have been most effective for you?
Contributed by: David Daukus As the economy recovers from the recession, consumers are becoming more responsible with their credit card usage; credit card debts have not increased and delinquency rates have declined. Delinquency rates as a percentage of balances continue to decline with the short term 30-59 DPD period, now at 0.9%. With mixed results, where is the profit opportunity? Further studies from Experian-Oliver Wyman state that the average bankcard balance per consumer remained relatively flat at $4,170, but the highest credit tiers (using VantageScore A and B segments) saw average balances increase to $2,422 and $3,208, respectively. It\'s time to focus on what you have—your current portfolio—and specifically how to: Increase credit card usage in the prime segments Assign the right lines to your cardholders Understand who has the ‘right’ spend Risk score alone doesn\'t provide the most accurate insight into consumer accounts. You need to dig deeper into individual accounts to uncover behavioral trends to get the critical information needed to grow your portfolio: Leading financial institutions are looking at consumer payment history, such as balance and utilization changes. These capture a consumer’s credit situation more accurately than a point in time view. When basic principles are applied to credit data, different consumer behaviors become evident and can be integrated into client strategies. For example, if two consumers have the same VantageScore credit score, credit card balances, and payment status, does that mean they have the same current credit status? Not necessarily so. By looking at their payment history, you can determine which direction each is heading. Are they increasing their debt or are they paying down their debt? These differences reveal their riskiness and credit needs. Therefore, with payment history added to the mix, you can more accurately allocate credit lines between consumers and simultaneously reduce risk exposure. Spend is another important metric to evaluate to help grow your portfolio. How do you know if a consumer uses primary a credit card when making purchases? Wouldn’t you want to know the right amount of credit to provide based on the consumer’s need? Insight into consumer spending levels provides a unique understanding of a consumer’s credit needs. Knowing spend allows lenders to provide necessary high lines to the limited population of very high spenders, while reducing overall exposure by providing lower lines to low spenders. Spend data also reveals wallet share—knowing the total spend of your cardholder allows you to calculate their external spend. With wallet share data, you can capture more spend by adjusting credit lines or rewards that will entice consumers to spend more using your card. Once you have a more complete picture of a consumer, adjusting lines of credit and making the right offer is much easier. Take some of the risk out of managing your existing customers and finding new ones. What behavioral data have you found most beneficial in making lending decisions? Source: Experian-Oliver Wyman Market Intelligence Reports
I'm here in Vegas at the Mobile2020 conference and I am fascinated by my room key. This is not the usual “insert in to the slot, wait for it turn green or hear it chime” key cards, these are “tap and hold to a door scanner till the door opens” RFID key card. It is befitting the event I am about to attend – Money2020 – the largest of its kind bringing together over 2000 mobile money aficionados, strategists and technologists from world over for a couple of days to talk about how payment modalities are shifting and the impact of these shifts to existing and emerging players. Away from all the excitement of product launches, I hope some will be talking about one of the major barriers for consumer adoption towards alternate payment modalities such as mobile – security and fraud. I was in Costa Mesa last week and in the process of buying something for my wife with my credit card, triggered the card fraud alert. My card was declined and I had to use a different card to complete my transaction. As I was walking out, my smartphone registers a text alert from the card issuer – asking me to confirm that it was actually I who attempted the transaction. And If so, Respond by texting 1 – if Yes Or 2 – if No. All good and proper up till this point. If someone had stolen my card or my identity, this would have been enough to stop fraud from re-occurring. In this scenario the payment instrument and the communication device were separate – my plastic credit card and my Verizon smartphone. In the next couple of years, these two will converge, as my payment instrument and my smartphone will become one. At that point, will the card issuer continue to send me text alerts asking for confirmation? If instead of my wallet, my phone was stolen – what good will a text alert to that phone be of any use to prevent the re-occurrence of fraud? Further if one card was shut down, the thief could move to other cards with in the wallet – if, just as today, there are no frameworks for fraud warnings to permeate across other cards with in the wallet. Further, fraud liability is about to shift to the merchant with the 2013 EMV Mandate. In the recent years, there has been significant innovation in payments – to the extent that we have a number of OTT (Over the Top) players, unencumbered by regulation, who has been able to sidestep existing players – issuers and card networks, in positioning mobile as the next stage in the evolution of payments. Google, PayPal, Square, Isis (a Carrier consortium formed by Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T), and a number of others have competing solutions vying for customer mind share in this emerging space. But when it comes to security, they all revert to a 4 digit PIN – what I call as the proverbial fig leaf in security. Here we have a device that offers a real-time context – whether it be temporal, social or geo-spatial – all inherently valuable in determining customer intent and fraud, and yet we feel its adequate to stay with the PIN, a relic as old as the payment rails these newer solutions are attempting to displace. Imagine what could have been – in the previous scenario where instead of reaching for my card, I reach for my mobile wallet. Upon launching it, the wallet, leveraging the device context, determines that it is thousands of miles away from the customer’s home and should score the fraud risk and appropriately ask the customer to answer one or more “out-of-wallet” questions that must be correctly answered. If the customer fails, or prefers not to, the wallet can suggest alternate ways to authenticate – including IVR. Based on the likelihood of fraud, the challenge/response scenario could include questions about open trade lines or simply the color of her car. Will the customer appreciate this level of pro-activeness on the issuer’s part to verify the legality of the transaction? Absolutely. Merchants, who so far has been on the sidelines of the mobile payment euphoria, but for whom fraud is a real issue affecting their bottom-line, will also see the value. The race to mobile payments has been all about quickly shifting spend from plastic to mobile, and incenting that by enabling smartphones to store and deliver loyalty cards and coupons. The focus need to shift, or to include, how smartphones can be leveraged to address and reduce fraud at the point-of-sale – by bringing together context of the device and a real-time channel for multi-factor authentication. It’s relevant to talk about Google Wallet (in its revised form) and Fraud in this context. Issuers have been up in arms privately and publicly, in how Google displaces the issuer from the transaction by inserting itself in the middle and settles with the merchant prior to firing off an authorization request to the issuer on the merchant’s behalf. Issuers are worried that this could wreak havoc with their inbuilt fraud measures as the authorization request will be masked by Google and could potentially result in issuer failing to catch fraudulent transactions. Google has been assuaging issuer’s fears on this front, but has yet to offer something substantial – as it clearly does not intent to revert to where it was prior – having no visibility in to the payment transaction (read my post here). This is clearly shaping up to be an interesting showdown – would issuers start declining transactions where Google is the merchant of record? And how much more risk is Google willing to take, to become the entity in the middle? This content is a re-post from Cherian's personal blog: http://www.droplabs.co/?p=625
By: Kyle Aiman Let’s face it, debt collectors often get a bad rap. Sure, some of it is deserved, but the majority of the nation’s estimated 157,000 collectors strive to do their job in a way that will satisfy both their employer and the debtor. One way to improve collector/debtor interaction is for the collector to be trained in consumer credit and counseling. In a recent article published on Collectionsandcreditrisk.com, Trevor Carone, Vice President of Portfolio and Collection Solutions at Experian, explored the concept of using credit education to help debt collectors function more like advisors instead of accusers. If collectors gain a better understanding of consumer credit – how to read a credit report, how items may affect a credit score, how a credit score is compiled and what factors influence the score – perhaps they can offer suggestions for improvement. Will providing past-due consumers with a plan to help improve their credit increase payments? Read the article and let us know what you think!
By: Kyle Aiman For more than 20 years, creditors have been using scores in their lending operations. They use risk models such as the VantageScore credit score, FICO or others to predict what kind of risk to expect before making credit-granting decisions. Risk models like these do a great job of separating the “goods” from the “bads.” Debt recovery models are built differently-their job is to predict who is likely to pay once they have already become delinquent. While recovery models have not been around as long as risk models, recent improvements in analytics are producing great results. In fact, the latest generation of recovery models can even predict who will pay the most. Hopefully, you are not using a risk model in your debt collection operations. If you are, or if you are not using a model at all, here are five reasons to start using a recovery model: Increase debt recovery rates – Segmenting and prioritizing your portfolios will help increase recovery rates by allowing you to place emphasis on those accounts most likely to pay. Manage and reduce debt recovery costs – Develop treatment strategies of varying costs and apply appropriately. Do not waste time and money on uncollectible accounts. Outsource accounts to third party collection agencies – If you use outside agencies, use recovery scoring to identify accounts best suited for assignment; take the cream off the top to keep in house. Send accounts to legal – Identify accounts that would be better served using a legal strategy versus spending time and money using traditional treatments. Price accounts appropriately for sale – If you are in a position to sell accounts, recovery scoring can help you develop a pricing strategy based on expected collectibility. What recovery scoring tools are you using to optimize your company\'s debt collection efforts? Feel free to ask questions or share your thoughts below. VantageScore is a registered trademark of VantageScore Solutions, LLC.
By: Uzma Aziz They say, “a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush” …and the same can be said about customers in a portfolio. Studies have shown time and again that the cost of acquiring a new financial services customer is many times higher than the cost of keeping an existing one. Retention has always been an integral part of portfolio management, and with the market finally on an upward trajectory, there is all the more need to hold on to profitable customers. Experts at CEB TowerGroup are forecasting a combined annual growth rate of over 12% for new credit cards alone through 2015. Combine that with a growing market with better-informed and savvy customers, and you have a very good reason to be diligent about retaining your best ones. Also, different sized institutions have varying degrees of success. According to a study by J.D. Power & Associates, in 2011 overall, 9.6% of customers indicated they switched their primary bank account during the past year, up from 8.7% a year ago. Smaller banks and credit unions did see drastically lower attrition than they did in prior years: just 0.9% on average, down from 8.8% a year earlier. For large, mid-sized and regional banks unfortunately, it was a different story with attrition rates at 10 to 11.3%. It gets even more complex when you drill down to a specific type of financial product such as a credit card. Experian’s own analysis of credit card customer retention shows that while the majority of customers are loyal, a good percentage attrite actively—that is, close their accounts and open new ones—while a bigger percent are silent attriters, those that do not close accounts but pay down balances and move their spend to others. Obviously, attrition is a continual topic that needs to be addressed, but to minimize it you first need to understand the root cause. Poor service seems to be the leading factor and one study* showed that 31% of consumers who switched banks did so because of poor service, followed by product features and finding a better offer elsewhere. So what are financial institutions doing to retain their profitable customers? There are lots of tools ranging from easy to more complex e.g., fee and interest waiver, line increases, rewards, and call center priority to name a few. But the key to successful customer retention is to look within the portfolio combining both internal and external information. This encompasses both proactive and reactive strategies. Proactive strategies include identifying customer behaviors which lead to balance or account attrition and taking action before a customer does. This includes monitoring changes over time and identifying thresholds for action as well as segmentation and modeling to identify problem. Reactive strategies, as the name suggests, is reacting to when a customer has already taken action which will lead to attrition; these include monitoring portfolios for new inquiries and account openings or response to customer complaints. In some cases, this maybe too little too late, but in others reactive response may be what saves a customer relationship. Whichever strategy or combination of these you choose, the key points to remember to retain customers and keep them happy are: Understand your current customers’ perceptions about credit, as they many have changed—customers are likely to be more educated, and the most profitable ones expect only the best customer service experience Be approachable and personal – meet customer needs—or better yet, anticipate those needs, focusing on loyalty and customer experience You don’t need to “give away the farm” – sometimes a partial fee waiver works * Global Consumer Banking Survey 2011, by Ernst & Young
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